This invention generally relates to the field of digitally controlled printing devices, and in particular to liquid ink print heads which integrate multiple nozzles on a single substrate and in which a liquid drop is selected for printing by thermo-mechanical means.
Ink jet printing has become recognized as a prominent contender in the digitally controlled, electronic printing arena because, e.g., of its non-impact, low noise characteristics and system simplicity. For these reasons, ink jet printers have achieved commercial success for home and office use and other areas.
Ink jet printing mechanisms can be categorized as either continuous (CIJ) or Drop-on-Demand (DOD). U.S. Pat. No. 3,946,398, which issued to Kyser et al. in 1970, discloses a DOD ink jet printer which applies a high voltage to a piezoelectric crystal, causing the crystal to bend, applying pressure on an ink reservoir and jetting drops on demand. Piezoelectric DOD printers have achieved commercial success at image resolutions greater than 720 dpi for home and office printers. However, piezoelectric printing mechanisms usually require complex high voltage drive circuitry and bulky piezoelectric crystal arrays, which are disadvantageous in regard to number of nozzles per unit length of print head, as well as the length of the print head. Typically, piezoelectric print heads contain at most a few hundred nozzles.
Great Britain Patent No. 2,007,162, which issued to Endo et al., in 1979, discloses an electrothermal drop-on-demand ink jet printer that applies a power pulse to a heater which is in thermal contact with water based ink in a nozzle. A small quantity of ink rapidly evaporates, forming a bubble, which causes a drop of ink to be ejected from small apertures along an edge of a heater substrate. This technology is known as thermal ink jet or bubble jet.
Thermal ink jet printing typically requires that the heater generates an energy impulse enough to heat the ink to a temperature near 400xc2x0 C. which causes a rapid formation of a bubble. The high temperatures needed with this device necessitate the use of special inks, complicates driver electronics, and precipitates deterioration of heater elements through cavitation and kogation. Kogation is the accumulation of ink combustion by-products that encrust the heater with debris. Such encrusted debris interferes with the thermal efficiency of the heater and thus shorten the operational life of the print head. And, the high active power consumption of each heater prevents the manufacture of low cost, high speed and page wide print heads.
Continuous ink jet printing itself dates back to at least 1929. See U.S. Pat. No. 1,941,001 which issued to Hansell that year.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,373,437 which issued to Sweet et al. in March 1968, discloses an array of continuous ink jet nozzles wherein ink drops to be printed are selectively charged and deflected towards the recording medium. This technique is known as binary deflection continuous ink jet printing, and is used by several manufacturers, including Elmjet and Scitex.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,416,153, issued to Hertz et al. in December 1968. This patent discloses a method of achieving variable optical density of printed spots, in continuous ink jet printing. The electrostatic dispersion of a charged drop stream serves to modulate the number of droplets which pass through a small aperture. This technique is used in ink jet printers manufactured by Iris.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,346,387, entitled METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTROLLING THE ELECTRIC CHARGE ON DROPLETS AND INK JET RECORDER INCORPORATING THE SAME issued in the name of Carl H. Hertz on Aug. 24, 1982. This patent discloses a CIJ system for controlling the electrostatic charge on droplets. The droplets are formed by breaking up of a pressurized liquid stream, at a drop formation point located within an electrostatic charging tunnel, having an electrical field. Drop formation is effected at a point in the electrical field corresponding to whatever predetermined charge is desired. In addition to charging tunnels, deflection plates are used to actually deflect the drops. The Hertz system requires that the droplets produced be charged and then deflected into a gutter or onto the printing medium. The charging and deflection mechanisms are bulky and severely limit the number of nozzles per print head.
Until recently, conventional continuous ink jet techniques all utilized, in one form or another, electrostatic charging tunnels that were placed close to the point where the drops are formed in the stream. In the tunnels, individual drops may be charged selectively. The selected drops are charged and deflected downstream by the presence of deflector plates that have a large potential difference between them. A gutter (sometimes referred to as a xe2x80x9ccatcherxe2x80x9d) is normally used to intercept the charged drops and establish a non-print mode, while the uncharged drops are free to strike the recording medium in a print mode as the ink stream is thereby deflected, between the xe2x80x9cnon-printxe2x80x9d mode and the xe2x80x9cprintxe2x80x9d mode.
Recently, a novel continuous ink jet printer system has been developed which renders the above-described electrostatic charging tunnels unnecessary. Additionally, it serves to better couple the functions of (1) droplet formation and (2) droplet deflection. That system is disclosed in the commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,079,821 entitled CONTINUOUS INK JET PRINTER WITH ASYMMETRIC HEATING DROP DEFLECTION filed in the names of James Chwalek, Dave Jeanmaire and Constantine Anagnostopoulos, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. This patent discloses an apparatus for controlling ink in a continuous ink jet printer. The apparatus comprises an ink delivery channel, a source of pressurized ink in communication with the ink delivery channel, and a nozzle having a bore which opens into the ink delivery channel, from which a continuous stream of ink flows. Periodic application of week heat pulses to the stream by a heater causes the ink stream to break up into a plurality of droplets synchronously with the applied heat pulses and at a position spaced from the nozzle. The droplets are deflected by increased heat pulses from the heater (in the nozzle bore) which heater has a selectively actuated section, i.e., the section associated with only a portion of the nozzle bore. Selective actuation of a particular heater section, constitutes what has been termed an asymmetrical application of heat to the stream. Alternating the sections can, in turn, alternate the direction in which this asymmetrical heat is supplied and serves to thereby deflect ink drops, inter alia, between a xe2x80x9cprintxe2x80x9d direction (onto a recording medium) and a xe2x80x9cnon-printxe2x80x9d direction (back into a xe2x80x9ccatcherxe2x80x9d). The patent of Chwalek et al. thus provides a liquid printing system that affords significant improvements toward overcoming the prior art problems associated with the number of nozzles per print head, print head length, power usage and characteristics of useful inks.
Asymmetrically applied heat results in stream deflection, the magnitude of which depends upon several factors, e.g. the geometric and thermal properties of the nozzles, the quantity of applied heat, the pressure applied to, and the physical, chemical and thermal properties of the ink. Although solvent-based (particularly alcohol-based) inks have quite good deflection patterns, and achieve high image quality in asymmetrically heated continuous ink jet printers, water-based inks are more problematic. The water-based inks do not deflect as much, thus their operation is not robust. In order to improve the magnitude of the ink droplet deflection within continuous ink jet asymmetrically heated printing systems there is disclosed in commonly assigned U.S. application Ser. No. 09/470,638 filed Dec. 22, 1999 in the names of Delametter et al. a continuous ink jet printer having improved ink drop deflection, particularly for aqueous based inks, by providing enhanced lateral flow characteristics, by geometric obstruction within the ink delivery channel.
The invention to be described herein builds upon the work of Chwalek et al. and Delametter et al. in terms of constructing continuous ink jet print heads that are suitable for low-cost manufacture and preferably for print heads that can be made page wide.
Although the invention may be used with ink jet print heads that are not considered to be page wide print heads there remains a widely recognized need for improved ink jet printing systems, providing advantages for example, as to cost, size, speed, quality, reliability, small nozzle orifice size, small droplets size, low power usage, simplicity of construction in operation, durability and manufacturability. In this regard, there is a particular long-standing need for the capability to manufacture page wide, high resolution ink jet print heads. As used herein, the term xe2x80x9cpage widexe2x80x9d refers to print heads of a minimum length of about four inches. High-resolution implies nozzle density, for each ink color, of a minimum of about 300 nozzles per inch to a maximum of about 2400 nozzles per inch.
To take full advantage of page wide print heads with regard to increased printing speed they must contain a large number of nozzles. For example, a conventional scanning type print head may have only a few hundred nozzles per ink color. A four inch page wide print head, suitable for the printing of photographs, should have a few thousand nozzles. While a scanned print head is slowed down by the need for mechanically moving it across the page, a page wide print head is stationary and paper moves passed it. The image can theoretically be printed in a single pass, thus substantially increasing the printing speed.
There are two major difficulties in realizing page wide and high productivity ink jet print heads. The first is that nozzles have to be spaced closely together, of the order of 10 to 80 micrometers, center to center spacing. The second is that the drivers providing the power to the heaters and the electronics controlling each nozzle must be integrated with each nozzle, since attempting to make thousands of bonds or other types of connections to external circuits is presently impractical.
One way of meeting these challenges is to build the print heads on silicon wafers utilizing VLSI technology and to integrate the CMOS circuits on the same silicon substrate with the nozzles.
While a custom process, as proposed in the patent to Silverbrook, U.S. Pat. No. 5,880,759 can be developed to fabricate the print heads, from a cost and manufacturability point of view it is preferable to first fabricate the circuits using a nearly standard CMOS process in a conventional VLSI facility. Then, to post process the wafers in a separate MEMS facility for the fabrication of the nozzles and ink channels.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a CIJ print head that may be fabricated at lower cost and improved manufacturability as compared to those ink jet print heads known in the prior art that require more custom processing.
It is another object of the invention to provide a CIJ print head that features structure suitable for providing lateral flow components to the fluid below the heaters so that the jets are deflected more for the same amount of heat.
In accordance with a first aspect of the invention there is provided a continuous ink jet print head having a plurality of nozzles, the print head comprising: a silicon substrate including integrated circuits formed therein for controlling operation of the print head, the silicon substrate having a primary ink channel formed therein; an insulating layer or layers overlying the silicon substrate, the insulating layer or layers having a secondary channel associated with each nozzle and formed therein and communicating with the primary ink channel; a bore for each nozzle and formed in a layer or layers overlying the insulating layer or layers and communicating with the secondary channel; and wherein the insulating layer or layers includes a blocking structure between the primary ink channel and the secondary ink channel, an access being provided between the primary ink channel and the secondary ink channel to permit ink from the primary ink channel to flow about the blocking structure and to enter the secondary ink channel at a location offset from the bore to provide lateral flow components to the liquid ink entering the bore opening.
In accordance with a second aspect of the invention there is provided a method of operating a continuous ink jet print head having a plurality of nozzles with each nozzle having a bore, the method comprising: providing liquid ink under pressure in a primary ink channel formed in a silicon substrate having a series of integrated circuits formed therein for controlling operation of the print head; causing the ink to flow into a secondary ink channel formed in an insulating layer or layers overlying the silicon substrate; asymmetrically heating of the ink as it flows around heaters to control the direction of an ink droplet from the nozzle; and providing lateral flow components to an ink jet or stream that is established by having ink flow about a blocking structure formed in the insulating layer or layers overlying the silicon substrate.
In accordance with a third aspect of the invention there is provided a method of forming a continuous ink jet print head having a plurality of nozzles and a bore associated with each nozzle, the method comprising: providing a silicon substrate having integrated circuits for controlling operation of the print head, the silicon substrate having an insulating layer or layers formed thereon, the insulating layer or layers having electrical conductors formed therein that are electrically connected to circuits formed in the silicon substrate; forming in the insulating layer or layers a secondary ink channel and a blocking structure for controlling lateral flow of ink from a primary ink channel formed in the silicon substrate to a secondary ink channel formed in the insulating layer or layers; forming a bore communicating with the secondary ink channel; and forming in the silicon substrate the primary ink channel communicating with the secondary ink channel.